1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to computer systems and software and more particularly to the performance management and performance monitoring of server-centric application framework servers and components.
2. Description of the Related Arts
Many organizations are migrating their legacy systems to server-centric application frameworks (SCAF), such as Sun Microsystems Java 2 enterprise environment (namely, J2EE application servers) and Microsoft .NET. While SCAF's such as the J2EE specification provide the capabilities for monitoring components at an individual level via Java Management Extensions (JMX), the specification and product vendors have fallen short on delivering real-time global views of internal application server performance. Production systems are monitored via individual component levels, external response time components, or merely CPU utilization of the physical machine/hardware.
Graphical visualizations provide an easy to read and quickly interpreted snapshot of data. However, conventional products only deal with data display and/or graphing of individual calls (method calls) and application server resources. Inexperienced viewers are challenged at interpreting the data. Moreover, as experienced technical developers focus on product enhancements and business requirements, many organizations are not prepared to handle the performance load of production systems.
Additionally, as developers focus on meeting incoming business requirements, systems administrators are left with the responsibility of ensuring performance metrics and Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Due to the lack of technical programming knowledge, these individuals are ill equipped to solve the performance issues.
Therefore, there is a need to have a near real-time visual display of all SCAF component performance data as well as interactions between the SCAF components in a manner that is easy to use and information rich. In addition, there is a need for automated analysis tools of immature and un-optimized procedure calls.